How are you positioning your marketing department for the future: below are excerpts from a recent online question-and-answer session conducted by marketers who participate in the aba marketing network's online community.

• Position: MARKETERS' FORUM

QUESTION:

If you are a bank of between $1 billion and $3 billion, how are you positioning your marketing departments for the future? Are you realigning responsibilities? Are you concerned about the types of skills you have on your team? What skill sets do you need, and how are you building for the changing banking environment?

RESPONSE:

Full-Time Marketing Staff Will Be Declining

I am $1.2 billion, and I am morphing from two full-time staff (along with me) to just me in the not too distant future. More outsourcing of creative and search engine optimization-type work, along with potentially a data scientist as a marketing/sales/IT full-time position will eventually round off my department of ... well, me!

RESPONSE:

We Just Expanded to a Team of Five

We are a $1.4 billion bank and have a marketing team of five. In fact, our newest position in the department is only about six weeks old. We're a community bank driven by a philosophy of local decision making and community involvement. As you can imagine, that means a lot of custom marketing work for our 21 locations in 18 different markets.

We have me, the marketing manager, who handles product research and development, electronic banking (testing and deployment), acquisition communication, building signage, CRM/database marketing, campaign coordination and "other as assigned;" a media and communications officer who focuses on traditional media and copywriting; a senior design and online marketing officer (0.8 full-time), who oversees all designers, is in charge of our large design projects, website and social media initiatives; a marketing coordinator/graphic designer, who coordinates many of our community events, trade shows, digital signage, work flow processes and 80 percent of the smaller design projects.

We just hired another marketing coordinator who will take care of all our administrative tasks, such as promotional-item inventory and ordering; smaller community events, such as parades and open houses; social media and e-marketing support, our e-newsletter, and back up for our media and communications officer.

Even with our diverse in-house talent, we still outsource specialties such as search engine optimization.

RESPONSE:

We Also Have a Staff of Five

. We are $16 billion and have five in our marketing department. We have a creative manager who handles advertising (traditional) and events; a marketing assistant that mostly handles events, promotional items and database entry work for...